The Los Angeles Riots: Independent and Webster Commissions Collections

The City in Crisis: Summary of the Webster Commission Report Findings

 

The City in Crisis: Summary of the Webster Commission Report Findings

After five months of collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing information, the Webster Commission concluded its study and presented its findings in a report, The City in Crisis, to the Board of Police Commissioners on October 21, 1992.  A copy of this report is not included in the Webster Commission Records, but the two-volume City in Crisis: A Report can be found at USC in the Library for International and Public Affairs.  

The Commission determined that no one entity was entirely to blame for the events following the Rodney King acquittals; rather, rioting became rampant due to a general lack of emergency preparedness and poor coordination between the LAPD and city leaders. The report concluded with three recommendations aimed at preventing similar occurrences in the future:
  1. The LAPD should place a greater emphasis on basic patrol duties by re-allocating officers away from special units and toward patrol assignments.
  2. Both the LAPD and the City of Los Angeles should devote more resources to emergency response planning and training.
  3. The city should overhaul its emergency operations center and emergency communications system to better coordinate emergency response procedures.
By presenting this summary of the Webster Commission’s findings in relation to some of the documentation the commission analyzed during its investigation, a principal goal of this resource is to prompt interest in examining—or reexamining—the investigation and its conclusions. Decades later, the questions addressed by both the Webster and Independent commissions in regard to law enforcement and communities’ responses to police brutality continue to resonate in the recent and widespread incidences of violence against communities of color and movements to address racist policing. A critical examination of the commissions’ records, only a fraction of which are shared here, have the potential to generate research projects offering new insights and understandings of the events of 1991-92; to assess the efficacy of commissions purportedly set up to implement change; and to historicize contemporary critiques of law enforcement. 
 

This page has paths: